ABSTRACT

Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823-1901) one of the nineteenth-century's most popular children's fiction writers, was born in Otterbourne, near Winchester, the only daughter of William Crawley Yonge (1795-1854) and Frances Mary Bargus (d. 1868). She had one brother, Julian Bargus (1830-92). Her father, a former army officer who had fought at Waterloo and in the Peninsular War, left the army in order to marry Yonge's mother, whose family objected to military men. He became a magistrate and took an active interest in church matters, which his daughter shared, beginning a long career of Sunday-school teaching when she was only seven. Educated by her father, Charlotte learned Latin and Greek; later she looked to John Keble, a leader of the Oxford Movement, who lived nearby, for advice on her writing. Her family decided she should publish only on condition that the profits of her writing were devoted to good works (mainly missionary projects).Yonge's best-known works were The Heir of Redclyjfe (1853) and The Daisy Chain (1856). She never married, and travelled abroad only once, to France. Yonge's lifespan almost paralleled Queen Victoria's: both dying in 1901. Her conservative, densely detailed novels about large families and their problems upheld the values of the Oxford Movement, her most popular heroine being fifteen-year-old Ethel May of The Daisy Chain, who competes with her brother at classical languages, but is ordered to stop and help her widowed father take care of his large family.

Yonge's autobiography, written in 1877, is unfinished, and concentrates solely on her childhood years. It was included in Christabel Coleridge's Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters (1903). Extensive family genealogies and anecdotes have been omitted from the following extract.